The grand finale of the BBC’s latestLe Carre’s adaptation is set to throw up one last surprise, as its executive producer confirms they deliberately changed the ending to keep viewers on their toes.

Simon Cornwell, the son of Le Carre, said programme-makers had purposely avoiding “pickling the book in aspic” as they developed it for television, arguing there would be little point in taking on the novel unless they could add something new.

John Le Carre, the spy novelist

He added the team had initially been “concerned” about fans fearing they had “strayed too far” in the series, but said the high ratings and critical acclaim had encouraged them about the audience’s broad minds.

“It’s not that we’ve tried to impose our own point of view on story in the adaptation, it’s that we’ve tried to bring out and recontextualise the novel in the present day,” he said.

“I think that’s exciting and it might have failed, but in a sense at least we were trying to do something interesting and something exciting.”

John le Carré (pointing) makes a cameo appearance in a restaurant scene filmed in Mallorca

In an interview with the Telegraph ahead of the final episode on Sunday, Cornwell said he had been thrilled with the reception of The Night Manager so far, with millions of people tuning in to watch the first episode on iPlayer as word of mouth about its popularity spread.

All of the changes, he added, had been fully approved by Le Carre himself.

The novelist has already made a cameo appearance as a restaurant diner in the show, the first time The Night Manager has been made for television.

Tom Hiddleston in the BBC adaptation of John le Carre's The Night ManagerCredit:
BBC

When asked what he and other television makers could learn from the success of the series, he said: “At the risk of sounding like a bit of a missionary, there’s an old cliché about being dumb in order to reach a big audience.

“We profoundly believe the opposite is true. Audiences are far more interesting, far smarter, far more sophisticated than a lot of television gives them credit for.